Pinoy John Waynes: The Western in Filipino America, 1919-1956
This paper traces some ways in which, responding to homelessness and racial violence, manongs (migrant working men from the Philippines in the United States) adopted and adapted the Western genre to forge collective notions of community by means of a settler masculinity. However, by virtue of adopting the Western, these cultures also absorbed white masculine settler modes of citizenship in America, laying the groundwork for some aspects of migrant conservatism that persists today. Drawing upon cultural history and visual analysis, I survey the emergence of an 'ethnic Western' in various aspects of Filipino cultural life: vernacular Taglish (Tagalog-English creole), diasporic nationalist cults, photography, and intellectual history.